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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		The octopus may not be colorblind after all ...
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:02
	Publish Date:		2016-08-15 19:00:00
	Description:		It looks like octopuses may be able to detect color thanks to their bizarrely shaped pupils. Cephalopods, as colorful as they are, have long been thought to be colorblind. But graduate student Alexander Stubbs of the University of California, Berkeley has a new theory explaining how color vision may still be possible through the chromatic blurring of objects. "Octopus, squid, and cuttlefish are widely regarded as some of the must colorfully dynamic creatures on planet Earth. But this was somewhat of a mystery because they had no normally known mechanism of sensing the wavelength of light or the color of objects. And what we showed in this paper is that their fairly unique pupil shape – with a U-shaped pupil in cuttlefish and squid or a dumbbell shaped bar pupil in octopus – means that they blur their image, but in a color dependent way. So they’re effectively able to focus through colors, rather than focusing beyond a certain distance."
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